Ray Aramini listened to his mom, and the community of Willimantic benefits from it.

WILLIMANTIC — When Ray Aramini was a boy, his mother used to volunteer for Meals on Wheels, driving food to homes. Ray would sometimes tag along.

There was a man named Victor on the route. Ray's mother encouraged him to get out of the car and bring Victor his food.

Aww, Mom.

"I would say, 'Mom, I don't want to do this. He is just going to talk about a lamp and his pear trees. He's going to talk about the same thing over and over,'" Aramini recalled. "And she said, 'That's all right. Listen to what he has to say.'

"It was the philosophy that it's important to feed a mouth but it's more important to feed a heart. To be available. Food doesn't cure loneliness. But it can act as the catalyst so you can have conversations."

It was the philosophy that it's important to feed a mouth but it's more important to feed a heart. To be available.— Ray Aramini

Aramini, 50, of Columbia, sat at a table at the Covenant Soup Kitchen in the basement of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in downtown Willimantic a few weeks ago. It was almost lunchtime and it was starting to get loud as the regulars streamed in. Many greeted Aramini, who is on the soup kitchen's board of directors and is there daily.

"Like this fellow that just walked in," Aramini said, nodding toward one of the men there for lunch. "He's a regular. I give him plastic cups. He has a collection of sorts. We talk about music he listens to on YouTube. When I see him on the street, I'll beep and I'll wave. But he never looks up. Nobody beeps and acknowledges the homeless. Nobody. They don't have friends who have cars. When somebody beeps at them, it's to get out of the way."

Aramini, who is a volunteer assistant coach for the Eastern Connecticut State University rugby team, has been involved in soup kitchens and various forms of community service most of his life. As a freshman in college, he helped his cousin run across the country to raise money for research by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He spent two years in Jamaica, working for a mission and a soup kitchen, and while he went to Keene State, at another soup kitchen in Keene, N.H.

He raised about a quarter of a million dollars for Willimantic's Covenant Soup Kitchen on two bike rides, one from Canada to Willimantic in 1996 and another called "Bike For Bread," in which he biked from California to Connecticut in 2000. This winter, his rugby team's Polar Plunge in Willimantic raised more than $100,000 for the soup kitchen.

His rugby players are deeply involved in community service, too, both current players and alumni. Former players Patrick Scully and Nick "Fitz" Fitzner biked from Washington to Willimantic to raise money for the soup kitchen in 2012 and two years ago, Scully and some others biked from Provincetown to Willimantic (with Fitzner helping as a crew member) to raise money for Bikes For Kids, a charity in Old Saybrook. Scully and Fitzner also started the Polar Plunge.

Many point to Aramini as the reason for their continued service.

"He's authentic," said Eastern President Elsa Nunez, who is a regular at home rugby matches. "He cares about community service and what it means to give back and he believes we should be helping people. It's impressive to see what he's done for Willimantic."

The rugby team doesn't just help at the soup kitchen. They shovel elderly people's driveways, rake yards, plant trees, clean up garbage and help with Eastern's freshman move-in day. They do jobs nobody wants to do, like helping people move out of flea- and cockroach-infested apartments into senior housing.

If something needs to get done, people know who to call.

"Everybody knows the rugby team," Nunez said in 2013. "They are my poster child. I would love every team to do what they are doing. They all do a lot, but no one does it better than the rugby team."

Aramini started playing rugby when he was at Keene State. He loved it. Years later, the sport helped save him in a way he would never have predicted.

In 2003, Aramini was working as a juvenile probation officer in Willimantic. One day in September, he was returning a video to Blockbuster and a freak accident changed his life.

"A grate that was in the sidewalk collapsed and I put my head into the sidewalk," he said. "For the next 31/2 years, I was in rehab for a brain injury. It was awful. I didn't believe there was a problem. I couldn't go back to work. I tried to go back to work. I couldn't do things. I couldn't take certain things — noises, music, distraction. I couldn't drive without throwing up. I was very quick to anger."

The traumatic brain injury forced him to retire from a job he loved, at a young age. He found himself on the other side of social services, receiving help. It was unnerving. He withdrew. He was angry and combative.

"I felt like a taker," he said. "It wasn't a feeling I was used to."

Exercise helped, so he worked out compulsively. One day, he noticed a flier on the gym wall about a rugby club starting at Eastern. Somebody asked him about coaching the next day. He was not interested, but he said one of his best friends, Joe Pardee, a rugby teammate at Keene State, might be. Pardee was. Aramini helped a little, but mostly sat in the stands and watched, and said little.

One day, Pardee called him. He couldn't make it to practice. Could Ray take over? What the hell … No. Absolutely not. Well, Joe said, you'll have to go tell the kids to go home.

Ray couldn't do that.

"He did it on purpose," Aramini said. "To push me. Son of a bitch."

He was scared. He had to write things down to remember on his arm, a habit he still has. At practice, one of the captains, Dan, told him not to worry; they had his back.

"They started the warmup lap," Aramini remembered. "One kid farts, another kid starts punching him. They're wrestling and hitting each other in the corner. I put my head down. [Dan] looks over at me and he goes, 'You guys, shut the hell up! You guys got to pay attention. You got to remember, Coach Ray's here to help us! And he's mental!'

"Then he looks over at me, like 'I got your back.' What I realized, though, was that was the first time I laughed at my injury. Dan liked me for me. He didn't know me before. And that was the beginning of my healing.

"No matter how much I've given to rugby, it's always given me more. Same with the Soup Kitchen."

Eastern rugby is open to anyone and the Warriors go toe-to-toe with some of the best teams in New England. But rugby is not the first priority.

"No. 1 is to be a good son," Aramini said. "You have to be involved with your family. No. 2 is your academics. You're here to go to school. No. 3, you need to honor your commitments, I don't care if it's to a girlfriend, a job, a relationship, something you said you would do. Fourth is rugby."

The team is close-knit. In August 2014, two players — one former and one current —- died within a week of each other. The players and coaches helped each other get through the tragedies.

"They reached out to the parents of those kids," said Ken Bedini, Eastern's vice president of student affairs. "It's not like they went to the funeral and walked away."

Bedini has known Aramini for more than a decade.

"No. 1, he's a good person," he said. "No. 2, he's developed this culture around rugby. It's about taking a group of young men from freshman year to graduation and turning them into responsible, socially astute people who go out into the community and do more for the community than most of our student organizations."

It's not surprising that a former rugby player, Jeremiah Blankenbaker, is now the volunteer and funding coordinator at the Soup Kitchen.

"Ray is a fixture in Willimantic," said Blankenbaker, who graduated from Eastern in 2014. "He's spent his life trying to better this community, reduce the suffering. He knows he can't fix the problem, but he can reduce the suffering.

"He does not like recognition at all. Many of us require it for our self-esteem. He doesn't want any of that. He doesn't want to be the center of attention. He's unique. I've never met a human being who does so much for so many people and refuses to take credit for anything."